“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi
In this earthly existence, I believe that monogamous relationships are a beautiful tool that are here to help us begin to understand the concept of what "LOVE" for another individual truly is. By this logic, however, it also seems that, in the end, these experiences are merely a rudimentary step along the pathway to our own personal enlightenment in our lives and to the elevation of our soul. In other words, these encounters seem to serve as more of a model for(or a way of) showing us how we should love and respect ALL beings equally and one of the best ways to do this, I believe, is to begin considering these experiences with others as just that...a beautiful experience. In this way we can start to relinquish our hold on one another and our expectations of others by simply not locking ourselves down to the idea of having just one intimate partner for the rest of our lives and opening our hearts to the whole infinite world of possible experiences that are out there for us to explore.
Our Western culture generally recoils at the idea of having amorous connections with more than one person in our lives, but I think we have something to learn from everyone we meet in this life and that people will come and go throughout our lifetime who have something to teach us through our experiences with them. When we become romantically involved with someone, we often unrealisitically begin to expect or hope that it might last forever, exclusively, but that's only because we've been brought up with our own limited perceptions of the world and perhaps even of our very existence itself here in the West.
Most of us have grown up in a culture where being in possession and control of things and of the people in our lives is a thing to be prized. As a result, we most often end up wanting someone in our lives that we can call our very own(and no one else's) in this life. Eastern traditions, however, have known for perhaps thousands of years, that in order for us to grasp mentally those higher understandings of life and love and nature, that we first have to let go of all those external views that are imposed upon us by our environment, as well as, the things inside us that often make us feel like we need to control the world and to covet things for ourselves...and this is done through a TRUE embodiment of love.
I believe that many of those individuals who have reached higher vibrational levels of consciousness through extremely deep meditation or even those in shamanic or tribal traditions who have, since the dawn of man, taken ayahuasca or payote or other consciousness expanding substances, that push one beyond the infinitely small minded nature of cultural and societal views, standards and expectations, understand this. This is because these altered states of consciousness allow one to step outside of the constraints of the three dimensional illusions of the world and thrust the individual beyond everything they've previously known into a place where, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they are able to think for themselves without the external suppositions of their environment.
That's not to say, of course, to go out and make love to everyone you meet or even to make it your goal to have as many experiences with as many people as you can in this life. It's only to say that beyond looking for someone in life that we can possess and call our very own, that rather, in the natural flow of things, we can be more open to the possibility of the experiences that we can have with people, what we can learn from them and what they can mean to our lives. In other words, we can take what we learned with someone and apply it to future encounters with others in our life, as a measure of refining our hearts and fine tuning our own expressions of love and through that achieve a higher understanding and wisdom of love along the way that moves us into higher levels of conscious thought.
Then, maybe we can learn to love the people we encounter along the way even more, from a place beyond jealousy and the fear of loss in our minds, as we allow them the freedom to be and express themselves as uniquely as they possibly can and hopefully, in turn, they can love us enough to allow us to do the same. The bond between two people is a beautiful thing to be sure, but just imagine all the things in your life that you couldn't have learned had you stayed with that first person that came along. It can be so easy to become caught up in our own whimsically romantic notions of saying that "we've arrived" or that "we've found our one true soul mate", but in all reality, in doing that we are really only closing ourselves off to the endless possibilities of deeper experience that this life has to offer.
There is another way, however. I mean, we can always discover that same true affinity for all beings by the traditional/historical method of simply not being taken in by intimate encounters with anyone at all. This, of course, has been done by the monks, the nuns, The Dalai Lama, The Buddha and so on, throughout the ages in our world, and likely because those individuals who sought true enlightenment realized at some point in their lives that romantic involvement with another might only complicate or distract an individual from the journey towards a pure, unbiased, love for all beings. I'm not completely sure, that we were necessarily meant to follow this route though, as those experiences of love and intimacy most certainly seem to be an integral part of the human experience that are rooted deeply within our souls.
I think that love and even intimacy are experiences that were perhaps meant to be explored with many people throughout our lifetime on many different levels. Our immature culture scoffs at this, however, and tries to tell us that that this is taboo and that we should be seeking "the one that's meant for us" in our lives and, in general, I think we pretty much follow, possibly unknowingly, what culture dictates that we do because it's really all we've ever known in our lives, but, by this logic, I tell you that I think there are many "one's" out there for us to encounter in our lifetime. I understand that this way of thinking is not a generally accepted view in our society, but I think that futher illustrates the point. The point is, we can make the choice right now to be free of fear and control and all the pain in the world if we can allow ourselves to just open up our minds and our hearts enough to just let go...
"NAMASTE"
(which means)
I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells.
I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light and of peace.
When you are in that place in you,
And I am in that place in me,
We are one.
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